


Barbed Business

by Merfilly



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-07
Updated: 2013-06-07
Packaged: 2017-12-14 04:50:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Lian Grayson-Harper has taken the reins of her 'grandfather's' company, she has to continue to contend with her half-brother and their murderous mother's ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barbed Business

**Author's Note:**

> Background pairings: Dinah/Ollie, Dinah/Slade, Dick/Roy, Babs/Ted, Grace/Anissa.
> 
> Lian's half-brother is the blink-and-miss-it child from Catman/Cheshire.
> 
> Originally written in 2007, collected as a whole now.

Instant Message Session Initiated

**Cheshire Cat07:** You do realize I will cut away every piece of your life after dismantling your empire?

**Dart0321:** You talk like you stand a chance.

**Cheshire Cat07:** It is all but done, sister.

**Dart0321:** DON'T call me that.

**Cheshire Cat07:** Truth hurts. So did your mistress of the bow.

**Dart0321:** …What have you done?

**Cheshire Cat07:** Merely exercising ALL of my skills…sister.

**Dart0321:** If you've harmed her…

**Cheshire Cat07:** I'll send you the pictures.

Instant Message Session Terminated

Lian sat back from the over sized executive desk, still so masculine despite this office having been hers for the better part of four years. She rubbed at her eyes, getting rid of the suspicious wetness there before she flicked a switch.

"Pierce. Choi. My office." She did not wait for acknowledgement. The un-twins knew better than to keep her waiting. She flicked another switch and the phone system connected her to her aunt. The image of the woman with the cybernetic eye flickered up, and Lian regarded her evenly as the call truly connected.

"What is it, Lian?" The woman was no nonsense in all things. Lian remembered her younger, more friendly and more like Lian's aunt, but a trip into a bad future had left the woman scarred in more ways than just the visible cybernetic enhancements.

"Olivia, I need to know if anything has crossed your sources concerning Shado." Lian nodded to her two bodyguards as they entered. The shorter of the two, darker in complexion nodded back; his half brother grinned with frightening results, looking like some tribally marked half-giant's son.

"The archer? Nothing. Should it?" Olivia was manipulating her data access, spooling a search for Shado. As the Black Queen of Checkmate, she had sources even Lian could not touch.

" _He's_ making threats and allegations again." Lian watched as both bodyguards stiffened. They knew just who _he_ was, and what it meant to their boss.

"I'll throw anything I learn your way, if I can." Olivia let her face soften some. Though she was supposed to be the younger by nearly eight years, Olivia's stay in the future had aged her to be ten years older than Lian. The gritty experience she had gained in the almost two decades out of time had made it hard to unwind, but she did love her family. "And if I can't tell you, I'll do what I can to rectify it."

"Thank you, Liv." Lian cut the connection, hating to ever utter the words of parting. She had heard them too many times…and all too often, permanently. "You two…step all security measures up. I'm going to curtail several of my routines, change things. Keep up with me."

"Of course, Miss Harper." That was Pierce, always showing his manners.

"Gotcha, Bosslady," Choi said casually. "Won't let a gnat land on your ass." Lian rolled her eyes at him.

"Go. I have other calls to make." She watched them leave, then called up her 'partner' of sorts. James Kord ran a supposedly rival company, but when all was said and done, KordTech was very nearly a subsidiary of Wayne Enterprises. And James preferred it that way, as it left him free to invent as easily as many people breathed air.

"James here…oh, it's you Li…"

"Yes, Jamie, it's me," Lian said, noting the clutter all over his desk. " _He's_ at it again."

"I'll let mom know. She put a pretty good spy on his assets last time." The younger man kept working as he spoke. "And I fixed the problem your R&D was having…they should get the notes this morning. Might be just the breakthrough at the right time."

"Let's hope so." She gave him a smile that showed she was defiant of all attempts to tear down what she had helped shape Wayne Enterprises into since the day Gran'pa Bruce had encouraged her to go to school instead of living by the bow.

"There's always hope, and we have plans, Dart…we've seen it coming awhile." He grinned at her. "Back to work, doll. See you tonight." He cut their connection, and Lian leaned back. Depending on what Olivia came back with would determine just how dirty she needed to be to handle her half brother this time.

* * *

The news from CheckMATE sources had not been good. Olivia Lance-Queen had rearranged several items on her agenda to help her niece, and finally turned up her half-brother in a coma, in a NeoTokyo hospital. This had not set well with Olivia at all; the young man was normally never without his mother. And no one had seen the woman anywhere near the man who had been dumped on the steps of the hospital a full week prior.

In the past, Olivia would have contacted her mother. That had been before the last time Cheshire and son had reared their heads, and their entire family had suffered the repercussions. In a manipulative, high stakes game of cat and mouse, two people had died, one was left in a catatonic state he had yet to come out of, and one had been left scarred for the rest of her life, emotionally. Olivia was not going to intrude on whatever peace her mother had found living at her other half- brother's ashram in the wake of that debacle.

She had no choice but to call Lian back, then, and let the highly successful CEO of Wayne Enterprises know what little she had learned. She reached for the switch, only to have an incoming call light up. When she accepted it, she saw the woman she needed staring grimly at her.

"Shado?" Lian demanded without any prelude.

"Robert was found in a hospital, but no one has seen her," Olivia admitted wearily. Her eyes widened as Lian held up a long black braid of human hair.

"My labs tell me the DNA matched the patterns I had on file for her." Lian did not look pleased at all. Shado had been the one she turned to, three summers in a row, before Bruce Wayne had taken her aside, to hone her skill in the bow. It had very neatly stopped the subtle pressure between her father and grandfather over who would train her more.

"It doesn't mean she's dead," Olivia warned.

"It doesn't mean she lives, either." Lian looked away, and then back with blazing eyes. "I want him removed," she growled. "He's a psychopath the likes of which my mother could not even rival."

"That's because your mother usually had motives of profit or gain…he lives only to torment the Arrow family." Olivia was checking her operatives, trying to find a team she could use to end this threat.

"I'll do what I can from my end…and try to keep this from going as far as it did last time, Liv." Lian reached out and flicked the connection off. Olivia turned back to her computer, watching events on the scroll. She was only half interested in her duties as Black Queen right now, worried over the remnants of her family.

* * *

James kissed Lian soundly as she walked in, before proceeding to fasten a necklace on her.

"What's this?" She looked at the symbol, small arrow heads etched into the outer edges around a dark blue bird head.

"The obvious tracker and life sign monitor," he told her. He then held up a Bones McCoy hypospray, and reached for her arm. "The less obvious one. Don't worry, these nanites are very strictly inhibited."

"Good. I do not want to live my life anything like Garric." The son of Raven and Beast Boy had been perfectly normal…until his father's ailment had proved hereditary and linked to a certain age trigger. Their other partner, Cyborg, had done what he could, trying to save the boy, but the cure had proven nearly as frightening as the disease for a time. Garric was truly a Metal Man, his soul and DNA fused forever with the intelligent nanites that made his body.

"Cyborg did what he had to, as you know." He gave her the injection, then held her as the temporary side effect of dizziness kicked in.

"I know…I just wish…sometimes I wish we all had been normal." She leaned into her lover for every bit of support he could give her.

"Li…you don't want that. Because that would mean our parents would have been normal. And who would have saved the world then?" James tipped her chin up, and made her meet his eyes. "We are who we must be. And we do what we can, Lian. As long as you and I do that together…we'll survive."

* * *

Instant Message Session Initiated

**Cheshire Cat07:** Did you get my present?

**Dart0321:** You will pay for that.

**Cheshire Cat07:** No, sister, I think not.

**Dart0321:** You bastard! You killed a work of art!

**Cheshire Cat07:** She was beautiful, wasn't she? Her skin was quite valuable…I had to be so careful not to mar it.

**Dart0321:** You son of a bitch…

**Cheshire Cat07:** Same bitch that threw you, fangless viper

**Dart0321:** You'll see my fangs soon enough.

**Cheshire Cat07:** I look forward to it.

Instant Message Session Terminated

Lian dropped her head to her desk, her hand shaking as she drew the long black braid to her face. First her Papa Dick, and her Grampa Ollie, now her teacher, Shado.

She could not let this happen again.

Her brother had to be removed, one way or another.

* * *

The restaurant was a nice one, quite upscale actually. The two people approaching the table pretended both of them belonged here, that this was a normal business lunch. Nearby at two smaller tables, the man noted his potential client's bodyguards, and repressed the smirk. Lian Grayson-Harper might be a business tycoon in a very smart pants suit, but he could see she had never let her skills slide away. She moved too silently, too full of the barely grounded motion that Grayson had given her.

"Harper." He would have preferred to call her Grayson, even as it made his chest twinge with memories.

"Wilson." She used a cool tone, and he was strikingly reminded of his other little bird.

"You indicated you had business."

"And you mentioned that the fee had changed." 

Their eyes met across the table before the waiter arrived and they each ordered.

"You're softer than you were the last time we discussed this," he snorted at her. She bristled immediately, her body language swearing at him that she was not.

"I could just pay you and be done with it," Lian informed him.

"True…but that takes away the investment I'm willing to make." His single blue eye looked at her from a permanently cynical face.

"I don't like it! It's not my place to make decisions like that." Her voice remained low, cold, just a hint of the redhead's temper rising into it.

"If you ask her to do this, she will give way to you. Or if you prefer letting her waste away in that monastery, when you know it kills her daily to be unable to help your father as she sits by his bed?" He made his voice slightly hard. "It is a small thing I ask. Her company, and the Cheshire Cat will no longer be able to strike your loved ones."

"I…" Lian thought of her lover, thought of Olivia, others she cared for, especially her aunt and uncle, as well as her helpless father. "I will speak with her. If she does not agree, will you renegotiate with me?"

"That, little Dart, remains to be seen."

* * *

Dinah brushed the red hair back from Roy's face, noting the utter peace in his features. She heard the door open, smelled the outside world, and turned to see Lian. Their own little girl, all grown up, and a successful woman, everything Bruce Wayne could have hoped for in his heiress. 

"Mama Di, I need to talk to you." Lian did not like sitting in here anymore. Not since the one and only time Roy had spoken in his long imprisonment behind his own mind. When the name at his lips had been her other father's, and she had broken down, she had lost all strength to be in here. She could not remember truly crying like that since. 

"I'll be back, Boy-o…our little girl needs me," Dinah said softly, brushing her lips over his forehead before following Lian out of the room, walking outside the ashram into the gardens. Lian noted the subtle hand of Dinah's work among the flowers, but she could not let it distract her.

"Shado is dead."

"Robert?" Dinah betrayed no sign of grief, but Lian knew it was there. No matter how strong a rivalry they held for Oliver Queen's attention, they had been sisters of a surreal sort.

"Recovering." Lian wished that word applied to her almost-mother, to her father. If even one of them had come back to her, not let Cheshire break them…. She ruthlessly cut that off. It was not Dinah's fault she had withdrawn from the world. In trying to save Papa Dick, she had knowingly sacrificed the love of her life. And then they had lost Dick anyway, as it proved to be a bit of treachery on Cheshire's part. With Roy lost to the poison that had paralyzed him, or the grief that had shattered his mind, Lian could not blame Dinah for falling away.

"Who?" Dinah knew that Shado would end in violence; they all lived by the way of the warrior.

"Cheshire Cat." Lian purposefully did not look at Dinah, knowing how pale the woman must now be. 

"So he did not die with his mother." Dinah's voice was eerily soft. "You are taking precautions?"

Now Lian stopped their ambling walk. "Mama Di…I won't lose anymore loved ones. He's the only real enemy who can strike me and hurt me by doing so."

Blue eyes were cloudy. "You've talked to Olivia? To the others?"

"Just James and Olivia, and the twins." She took a deep breath. "And him."

Dinah's breath hissed in. "NO!" 

"His stakes have changed…he doesn't want me now." Lian was unsure how to go about this. If she had accepted Deathstroke's offer last time, become his apprentice and walked out from Wayne Enterprises, maybe her family would still be alive.

"If not you, then…"

"He wants you."

* * *

It was dark in the monastery, as she pulled the small chest out. Very deliberately, she drew out the black and gray armor, a costume she had not worn in so very long. The fact it still fit was a lingering testimony to youthful misadventures. She slid on several smaller pieces of equipment, items she might not have bothered with back then. She then strode very purposefully to the bed.

"Boy-o, I have to go." She leaned over the catatonic man. "Connor and the rest will continue to take care of you. But I have to go finish this. And I'm going to do it on my terms, not his." She sighed ever so softly. "Oh, Roy. How I wish…" She stopped herself, kissed his still red hair lightly, and squeezed his hand. "Goodbye, Roy Harper, son of my heart."

Never looking back, the small woman left the last link to her soul behind.

* * *

"Out of practice," his voice taunted. The blade passed again, and she felt another stinging cut, no doubt laced with the second agent to activate the poison of the first one. "Foolish to face me, in the seat of my power," he added, a vicious, almost insane smile on his lips.

She knew she did not have much time; Cheshire Cat was just as good as his mother with the poisons, and as fond of paralyzing his prey as she had been in later years. With that thought in mind, she pressed her attack harder, more viciously, making Cheshire Cat react to her dance, to follow her lead. 

The younger fighter worked inside her defense again, arm poised for a killing strike. "It will be so nice to…" The gloating tone and words fell away in a gurgle as his body jerked, hit by a very precise, crossbow bolt. Dinah let him fall, and looked over the body at her daughter.

"You killed him?"

"Needed to happen, Mama," Olivia said. "Capture would just have led to an escape, more twisted plotting. Now, let me get you to a doctor."

"Doubt it will do much good." Dinah managed to move toward her approaching daughter a total of three steps before she collapsed, prompting Olivia to run and kneel at her side.

"MAMA!" 

"She can't hear you, I'd say," came a very low, masculine rumble before Deathstroke stepped from a shadow. Olivia hissed as he came toward them, a wristbolt aimed his way. "Go ahead…shoot. She dies." He had a syringe in his hand. "Put it aside, and I take her, and she most likely lives."

Olivia was torn…when her mother asked her to back her up, she had the impression that Dinah fully expected not to survive the encounter. Having made her peace with death, Dinah might not forgive Olivia…but the younger woman could not let her mother die if there was another option. Not when so many had been ripped out of Lian's life, her own.

"If she eventually leads you to your downfall, I'll cheer," Olivia said, moving away. She knew only the rumors of their tempestuous affairs over the years, brought to a screeching halt when the man had very nearly drawn Lian into his world.

Slade merely shrugged her words off, and moved to where he could inject the syringe directly into Dinah's vein. Olivia watched skeptically, until he picked her up.

"She's probably going to hate you," Olivia pointed out. "She had made her peace."

"It won't be the first time she's been angry." The mercenary started to walk away with the woman. "Goodbye girl."

"God, let mama forgive me."

* * *

Lian set the phone back in its charger. She steepled her fingers in front of her as she considered the outcome of her contract.

Slade had returned half the fee; Olivia had surprised them both by being willing to take the final step. It merely remained to see just how well Dinah adapted to the fact Slade had saved her life, and what the effects of what he had used on her were.

"And life goes on…"


End file.
